Daily Times

Mustafa Zaidi was one of the leading poetic voices of Pakistan. In one of his beautiful verses, he states: “On whose hands should I seek my (spilt) blood, (as) the entire city is wearing gloves”. However, the blood of Mashal Khan, a university student in Pakistan, who was lynched on 13 April 2017 by fellow students inside university premises over allegations of blasphemy, can be seen on the hands of those who worked for decades to set Pakistan on the perilous road of utter destruction.

“The evil that men do”, Shakespeare says, “lives after them”. In fact, they keep haunting and afflicting the coming generations. The fall of Bengal was a watershed in the history of Pakistan, although its own creation was hardly any different. The country was left to the mercy of a Caesar who maneuvered the ripe conditions to consolidate his power. To choke the masses, the most devious card was played, which ended with declaring a sect among Muslims as heretics. The tide of intolerance, which was set in motion, ceases to ebb to this day.

‘Insane sects”, Adorno says, “grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction”. The immediately following Bonapartism let loose the fire of religious hatred, which got its fuel from a large constituency of lumpen-proletariat of religious and reactionary hue. The war against the ‘evil’ empire was fought with these men of ‘virtues’; once it was over they found themselves out of job, hence were modeled into guardians of virtues and enemies of vices. Since then Pakistan has fallen a hostage to religious puritans.

Pakistani state — otherwise wallowing in the mire of hunger, poverty, inequality and the corruption of oligarchy spreading from Afghan jihad to Swiss and Panama scandals — appears to have been left with a solitary job of guarding the honor of all holy sages of yesteryear. Emperor Farouk of Egypt was the first to discover and diagnose our eagerness for this malady, informing us sarcastically that Islam existed much before 1947. Weren’t the founding fathers of this ‘nation’, or whatever hotchpotch it was, aware of this fact when they imposed the ‘objective resolution’, a totalitarian version of Islam, on the people? One has to be very naïve to think that the consequences of this move did not occur to them. The only possible defense, argued in their favor, is the emergence of the civil-military nexus, which was too powerful to be resisted by their feeble political organization, if there was any.

Populism, a kind of fascism, is always a precursor to total chaos and utter destruction. The state which found its messiahs in two martial law administrators, first a general and then a charismatic man in civilian cloak, succumbed to religious totalitarianism when Zia, the ‘little-man’ of Nietzsche, finally tolled the bell with a lethal strike. The rest was the continuation of the same syndrome. From the mysticism of Musharraf to the Sala fist tradition, the country kept swinging between absolute economic bankruptcies to periods of brief, albeit superficial, economic recovery based on loans to pay the various debts compounded upon the national exchequer. Hence, an appallingly large stratum of devastated middle class was the obvious outcome.

Whatever gloss of superimposed happiness that remained was taken away by the market economy. The disposable income could not sustain the onslaught of consumerism. Today, most public facilities, including health and education, stand crippled. In such a society where self-preservation is the sole option and “competition for the basic cultural goods is the pivot of action, people cannot be taught to love one another”.  Laing continues to assert: “It thus becomes necessary for the schools to teach children how to hate without appearing to do so”.

Under a repressive whole, the self is divided into inner and outer halves, a situation akin to schizophrenia when the only possible freedom is either to exploit the labour of the other fellow being or to be exploited

In a society where horror and joy have lost their meaning, their occurrence in every daily life becomes a routine affair. Since the society is least alive, it can easily inflict death on its members. It is an inferno in which humanity has to plunge, a concentration camp, a barbarity where “madness ceases to be a breakdown but a break throw, potential renewal and liberation as well as enslavement and existential death” (Laing). “Writing poetry after the Auschwitz”, says Adorno, ‘is barbaric’, yet this barbarity becomes music to the ears of those enslaved by the domination of this stylized savagery. Those who lynch a human being while reciting religious poetry, imposing perdition on humanity becomes a means of catharsis.

Under a repressive whole, self is divided into inner and outer halves, a situation akin to schizophrenia when the only possible freedom is either to exploit the labor of the other fellow being or to be exploited. In either condition, the inner half breaks away its relation with the outer, the ‘other’. The ‘other’ is forsaken, an avowed enemy, which can be torn to pieces. “Such mass psychoses have an origin and a function. Only human beings who are forced to hide something catastrophic are capable of erring so consistently and punishing so relentlessly any attempt at clarifying such errors” (Wilhelm Reich).

According to Laing, “The ego is an instrument for living in this world. If the ‘ego’ is broken up, or destroyed, then the person may be exposed to other worlds, ‘real’ in different ways from the more familiar territory of dreams, imagination, perception or phantasy.” Hence, ego needs to be maintained even at the cost of some hollow sublimated purpose: race, religion and nation to name a few. The subservient masses are restricted to the base desire of seeking bread and circuses. In absence of both, they find a victim and pour all the gall of hatred upon him. Mashal Khan was one such human who lost his life to the absolute inhumanity of the crowd.

The recurrent beast, an old spectre, which keeps pouncing every now and then, is the hallmark of a society that is intrinsically ‘necrophiliac’. Perhaps, one could borrow a word or two from Vladimir Mayakovski and adapt it to our context: “There’s no cause for joy” but a definite cause for grief — “For the waters of history are roiling”. Is there any hope left for this morbidity? Horkhemier has an answer: “… the very economic and cultural processes that are bringing about the obliteration of individuality, promise — though the augury is faint enough at present — to usher in a new era in which individuality may re-emerge as an element in a less ideological and more humane form of existence.” Until then, one can count on Marlow, for whom hell has no limits and “all places shall be hell that are not heaven; for where we are is hell”.

The writer has authored books on socialism and history. He blogs at saulatnagi.wordpress.com and can be reached atsaulatnagi@hotmail.com